Probably a better teacher too when it comes to that. This is the kind of insightful critiques that really help me to build the skills I’m going to require to be successful.
I suppose I should clarify; I had a paper returned for revision and among the reasons it was kicked back are:
Missing sentence case for article title – The titles of work appear in title case, with most words capitalized, instead of sentence case.
Missing italics of journal title – APA style requires the use of italicized font for periodical volumes.
Separate the single author and the publication date with a comma in-text.
The abbreviated version of the word ‘volume’ is improperly included.
All text should be double-spaced
Some rando evaluator
What I’d really like to get from an evaluation is maybe some indication of whether or not I understood the material from the class well enough to put together a coherent argument. What I get is ”MISSING COMMAS, IMPROPER ABBREVIATION FOR ’VOLUME’!”
Which would make sense if I was working on my masters in copy editing.
To be fair, I don’t really know what ThedaCare was paying the employees that quit, nor do I know how much they were asking for to stay.
Even without knowing exactly what the anount is, I’d be perfectly happy to bet that amount and more on the guess that what the employees were asking for is less than half, and probably much closer to one third, of what ThedaCare is offering to pay travelers to replace them.
After Monday’s testimony, Judge McGinnis said ThedaCare did not meet all four of the required prongs to keep the temporary injunction in place.
“Could or should ThedaCare and Ascension get together and work in this transition period? I was hoping so over the weekend and I will continue to hope so. But I’m not able to craft any type of injunction that would require or limit Ascension without, I think, creating more issues or more friction, or taking away the ability that they have to provide healthcare services,” the judge said.
The decision means the seven medical workers can start work immediately at Ascension.
Thank goodness for that. Just knowing the judge thought it was reasonable to do this in the first place is plenty bad, at least he had the sense to realize it and put the whole thing…
ThedaCare requested Thursday that an Outagamie County [Wisconsin] judge temporarily block seven of its employees who had applied for and accepted jobs at Ascension from beginning work there on Monday until the health system could find replacements for them.
The employees were part of an 11-member interventional radiology and cardiovascular team, which can perform procedures to stop bleeding in targeted areas during a traumatic injury or restore blood flow to the brain in the case of a stroke. Each of them were employed at-will, meaning they were not under an obligation to stay at ThedaCare for a certain amount of time.
Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis granted ThedaCare’s request and held an initial hearing Friday morning. The case will get a longer hearing at 10 a.m. Monday.
McGinnis told lawyers for both health systems they should try to work out a temporary agreement by the end of the day Friday about the employees’ status until Monday’s hearing.
Otherwise, he said, the order prohibiting them from going to work at Ascension would be final until a further ruling was made. That means the seven health care workers would not be working at either hospital on Monday.
I intended to write about this when the saga first began because I was concerned, but then I though “Ha! There’s no way a judge in an AT-WILL EMPLOYMENT STATE would tell a bunch of employees they can’t quit their job”, but here we are.
A group of highly specialized hospital employees announced en masse that they were going to leave their current AT-WILL EMPLOYER to go to another facility that paid more. “After approaching ThedaCare with the chance to match the offers they’d been given, [one of the employees] wrote that they were told ‘the long term expense to ThedaCare was not worth the short term cost,’ and no counter-offer would be made”. Instead, the hospital went to court to get an order to prevent the staff from quitting.
And it looks like they’re going to get it.
This is only a preliminary injunction and it doesn’t tell the employees they can’t quit, but it does tell them that they can’t start a new job until the legal matter is settled. There is another hearing on Monday.
Keep in mind that 51% of Americans have 3 months or less worth of savings and 25% have no savings at all. The judge can’t order the employees not to quit but he can (apparently) prevent them from taking another job. I have no doubt the current employer knows, once their employees are prevented from taking another job, all they have to do is drag out the proceedings for a few weeks to a few months and their employees will be faced with the choice of economic ruin or going back to work for them.
It is no secret that hospital staffing is in a major crisis right now and a lot of what is driving that is people taking the opportunity to pursue better paying jobs. The femtosecond this ruling came down, I can guarantee that hospital CEOs all over the country were waking their corporate lawyers up and telling them to get to work filing for injunctions. Why pay competitive wages when you can just get a judge to force your employees to keep working for you? Why pay them at all in fact?
I am a highly specialized, essential worker who is not currently interested in doing the job that I am highly specialized to do.
And generalized anxiety disorder as well, just for good measure (F43.12 and F41.1 for those tracking ICD-10 codes). I’ve probably had PTSD for a while now just based on the most common reaction I’ve had when I tell people this, which has been some variation of “Wait… you didn’t know?”
One of the funny1 thing about how my brain works is how it managed to have virtually every symptom of PTSD but somehow rationalize each and every one of them as being not only unrelated to PTSD, but as being completely separate issues that are unrelated to each other. Haven’t been sleeping well? I never sleep well. Been really irritable? Totally understandable, I’ve been busy and under a lot of pressure. Hyper-alert and anxious? I’ve been an ICU nurse for 20 years, being alert is part of the job and I’m just having trouble turning it off. Haven’t been able to make it through a whole shift at work because of overwhelming angst? Fatigue from cancer treatment combined with baseline laziness.
There were a few incidents which really made me think there was something more going on and my increasing dysfunction at work (documented in other posts on this site) was becoming unsustainable. I talked to my therapist, I talked to my primary care provider (actually I talked to Dr. Rando, MD because my regular PCP was booked out until the end of the month) and I got a referral to a psychiatrist. I’m off work until the middle of next month and when I go back to work I will not be returning to bedside nursing. As of the third week of February I will be a nursing supervisor at Swedish.
I’ll probably talk more about this new job later. I have a month to, as my father says, get my nervous system pulled back inside my body and then we get to find out if I can keep working as a nurse in any capacity or if I really have managed to blow out all my circuits.
1 Not like “ha ha” funny, more like “what’s that smell” funny.
“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now,” said Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, “which is most people are going to get covid.”
Woodcock pitched this as being a necessary acknowledgment when it comes to charting the path forward — recognizing that the focus now needs to be on averting the worst that widespread infections could bring in the near term.
“What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens,” she said. “I think after that will be a good time to reassess how we’re approaching this pandemic.”
Woodcock pitched this as being a necessary acknowledgment when it comes to charting the path forward — recognizing that the focus now needs to be on averting the worst that widespread infections could bring in the near term.
The Washington Post January 11, 2022 at 3:52 p.m. EST
As the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire across the United States, it’s likely just about everybody will be exposed to the strain, but vaccinated people will still fare better, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert said Tuesday.”Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected
CNN 9:04 AM ET, Wed January 12, 2022
We appear to have surrendered to the virus.
Just as a little thought experiment, imagine if omicron kills 1% of the people it infects (actually it’s higher than that). If, as the experts now seem to think, everyone in the country is going to get infected that’s an additional 3,000,000 plus deaths in the U.S. alone and that’s just from the virus. Add in the number of deaths from delays in receiving care for other non-covid health issues and who knows what kind of numbers we can put up.
Humans have lost, the virus has won, and it was almost entirely avoidable.
This popped up on one of the nursing forums I lurk on so I can’t absolutely vouch for its authenticity, but it seems unfortunately plausible. Someone wants to put themselves on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation at home rather than get vaccinated.
As a point of information, this is what someone on ECMO looks like:
I assure you there is a patient under all that equipment
And just for further fun, this is what happens when a component on the ECMO circuit fails and you have to swap it out for a new one:
That was a real patient (I was filming) and once my two colleagues there put the clamps on the circuit the patient was, by some quite reasonable definitions, dead and wasn’t really alive again until they took the clamps off.
So yeah, go ahead and do this at home. Good plan. WAY better than getting vaccinated.
Edited to add – Looking at the picture and video above, I am almost positive they are the same patient. I remember when we were getting set up to change the oxygenator there was a great deal of unease because the patient was entirely dependent on the pump to keep his blood circulating. His heart was not actually beating at all.
A normal person with even a minimally functioning heart will produce a tracing on an arterial blood pressure line that looks similar to this;
The red line there measures the pressure changes in an artery (usually the radial artery in the wrist, the same place you feel for someone’s pulse) with every beat of the heart.
If you look closely at the two monitors in the picture above that have an art-line tracing on them, you will see this;
Those lines are, in fact, flat. This is not all that unusual for people with bad hearts that have a pump doing all the work for them but what it does mean is that if something stops the pump, like someone clamping the circuit so they can change the oxygenator, all the patient’s blood pressure goes away. Not “low blood pressure” but “no blood pressure”.
So again, go ahead. Do this at home. What could possibly go wrong?
If you want to learn more about extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, check your local library!
Or just ask and I’ll talk about it for as long as you’ll let me.
One of the more common objections to the covid vaccine is that no one who claims to be a Good Christian™ (and it’s always Christians) can get the vaccine because it was made using “aborted fetuses”.
As anyone with more than two functioning neurons could guess, reality is a bit more complicated. The Oxford-AstraZenica vaccine was, in fact, developed using Human Embryonic Kidney 293 (HEK-293) cells. These cells are commonly used to replicate viral proteins which are then used to deliver mRNA sequences. The HEK-293 cells themselves are not a part of the finished products.
“But wait,” you might say, “If the AstraZenica vaccine is the only one that is manufactured using HEK-293 cells, why don’t they just take one of the other ones?” Well here’s the thing, HEK-293 cells are also frequently used in the early stages of development to test the function and potential toxicity of a new drug, and every single one of the covid vaccines was tested on HEK-293 cells. What can a Good Christian™ do but decline to take these vaccines that were tested on the cloned cells of an immortalized cell line originally derived from the kidneys of a fetus that was either aborted or miscarried, no one is quite sure which, in 1973 poor innocent murdered babies.
The problem is that there are a METRIC CRAPTON (2.2 imperial craptons) of drugs that are tested for safety using HEK-293 cells.
(Blatantly stolen from https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughcatholiclenses/2021/01/if-any-drug-tested-on-hek-293-is-immoral-goodbye-modern-medicine/)
Common over the counter medicines tested on HEK-293 cells or derivative cell lines.
Take particular note, if you will, of numbers 12 and 15 on the list of prescription medications and you may spot some familiar names if you’ve been following the trends in quack covid treatments.
Essentially, if Good Christians™ are going to take a moral stand against being vaccinated because of their opposition to abortion, they’re pretty much going to have to give up on modern medicine. Fortunately, at least one employer is asking anyone requesting a religious exemption from the vaccine to do just that.
If it’s a sincerely held belief, you have to be consistent, right?
